This invention relates to the field of on-line commerce. In particular, the invention relates to fallback ordering for an on-line commerce environment.
On-line or e-commerce sites rely on the availability of their web servers in order to be able to conduct business. When these servers become unavailable due to excessive load or if there is an actual error on the server, then customers cannot place orders and goods cannot be sold.
Current solutions to this problem include the following.
1) The customer sending an e-mail to the business. This is an error prone process which requires effort on the part of the customer to correctly identify the item which they wish to purchase, in a context that the receiving entity must be able to understand. They will also have to supply all the required data in order to complete the transaction. This will potentially result in a number of communications (in this case e-mails) between the customer and the business over an extended period of time.
2) Asynchronous queuing of orders using a messaging-orientated middleware product such as IBM WebSphere MQ. (IBM and WebSphere are trademarks of International Business Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions worldwide.) The disadvantage of this method is, although the back end systems have been deployed using queuing technology, if the web server is unable to process the request, then the data cannot be placed on the queue.
3) The customer telephoning the business to place the order. This suffers from all the disadvantages listed in point 1, but also assumes that the telephone number can be located in the first place. Several internet only traders do not list any contact options beyond e-mail.